Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a fascinating discussion about the role of genetics, culture, and sociology in influencing human behavior, specifically related to extremism. In this discussion, they explore how twin studies can shed light on the genetic underpinnings of sociological profiles and delve into why religiosity might not be the main factor behind certain societal phenomena. They touch on the concept of the "right-wing authoritarian personality" and its prevalence across both political spectrums. With a deep look at the factors influencing high birth rates, the duo illuminates the significance of outgroup hatred and comfort with hierarchy. This conversation draws intriguing connections between cultural fidelity, fertility rates, and political polarization, ultimately discussing the impact of selective pressures on societal evolution.

Based Camp: The Big Plan what the Pronatlist Movment is Really About

Malcolm: [00:00:00] Hello Simone. So the thing that we are most known for publicly is our stuff on demographic collapse, collapsing populations, and the effects it'll have on society. Now, this is not something that we have talked about on our podcast as to why we haven't talked about this on our podcast yet. It is because , we've talked about it in a million other interviews in a million other places.

Malcolm: Everywhere. Everywhere, yeah. And I figured people coming to our podcast, they don't wanna see it. That, that's, they've already heard this talk before, but now I am realizing from some of the comments that some of the people don't know it and haven't seen it. And so, instead of giving our standard stump speech on this,

Malcolm: I wanna engage with this topic more conversationally, the way that we typically do this podcast, because, when I've sat down and tried to do this, this iteration of the podcast before I just end up narrating my stump speech, and then Simone's sitting there not talking, or Simone's doing her stump speech.

Malcolm: And so let's see if we can turn this into a conversation.

Would you like to know more?

Simone: All right, [00:01:00] Malcolm, so, what happened aside from you and ending up living in brothel when you went to South Korea? I.

Malcolm: Well, where I always start with, and this was really where I started to, to panic about this, is it's

Simone: actually kind of telling that you were living in a brothel and not like in a maternity word of a hospital.

Malcolm: Yeah. Let's talk about living in a brothel. Cause this is part of the story that people dunno. Yeah. So, I had gone to Korea after I graduated from Stanford Business School and I had sent my wife, we had just done a startup together, which we had invested a lot of our money into. Yeah. Google had then hired me and then waited six months to employ me.

Malcolm: Yeah. And during that time, the little money we had left after the startup had slowly dwindled to nothing. Yeah. And then you got into Cambridge for your graduate degree.

Simone: Yeah. And, and I was also in, in contrast put in a cuz at Cambridge you belong to the university, but then also you belong to a college.

Simone: And I'm living in a. The, the Catholic dorm. The Catholic College, St. Edmonds. And here you are.

Malcolm: Well, and [00:02:00] it's beautiful dorm. Gorgeous, beautiful. Everything. Anyway, gorgeous. Yeah. So, I mean, I had to find a way to pay for you to, to go there, right? And so I ended up having to drop the contract with Google cuz they couldn't find, I, I don't know what happened.

Malcolm: Like they had this system where they used to be able to hire people, but they wouldn't have a position for you. So I left them and I ended up going to Korea, but I had to live as inexpensively as possible to support my wife. So I was actually the director of strategy at the number one early stage firm in the country.

Malcolm: And this was by a government survey at the time. Like, they asked all the entrepreneurs where they most want money, think of it's like Y Combinator for Korea. And, and that story actually gets really crazy and interesting. But anyway, so I chose to stay at a place. That was smaller than the room I'm in now.

Malcolm: My entire room was, was really small. It was a twin, and then half of the space that a twin would be as a little walking corridor. And then they had a glass cabinet which was just where the toilet was. And then there was a little shower on top of you cuz they didn't have a different space for the shower in the toilet. And one day I remember I was walking back to where I was and, [00:03:00] and, and, and somebody at my firm, they go, no, no, no, no, you gotta stop, stop walking down into that neighborhood.

Malcolm: It's a really dangerous neighborhood. And I was like, what are you talking about? They're like, look, if you need to get to the subway, here's the way you could go. And I'm like, I, I, this is the only way I know to get to our live. So I kept walking and then they're like, okay, well you just can't walk, you cannot walk down that particular street.

Malcolm: And I was like, look, I know no other way. And they're like, okay, at least I'll accompany you. And then I turned to go down this alley and they're like, actually I. Seriously, there's got to be another way to get to where you live. I even can't follow you down this alley. And this alley is where my apartment was.

Malcolm: And what I realized is in Korea, anyone who's been there, like it's such a nice clean place that apparently, like even this like really ghetto area where I was living, to me as, as a somebody from the US felt like really clean and nice. I mean, I guess I should have known given how cheap the apartments were there.

Malcolm: But the reason specifically they said is they go, this is where all the brothels are. This is the brothel [00:04:00] street. And I was like, oh. That maybe that's why everyone's so nice to me.

Simone: And yeah. And then, but what did you learn? I mean, I mean it's, it's again, it's telling that you are surrounded by people who are maybe interested in sex, but not families. You weren't in enough families. Yeah. You weren't in like a tenement full of crying babies. You were in just a

Malcolm: process. But anyway, so to get to the part of the story that people normally hear is, I was working at this firm and there was this one day where, I've got a plan where the country's gonna be in 50 to a hundred years.

Malcolm: So I'm, I'm, I'm making this plan, and I'm looking at the numbers and I'm like, well, s**t, there's not gonna be a country in a hundred years. I, if you look at their current fertility rate, which is like 0.79, 0.8, depending on what you're looking at, that means for every hundred Koreans of life today, there will be 6.4 to like 5.9 great-grandchildren.

Malcolm: And this number is decreasing almost every year. So it's almost certainly gonna be less than that. And you can't survive [00:05:00] in the country if you're looking at like a 93% population collapse over the next century. Your e economic systems fundamentally ceased to work. And I went to the other partners in my firm and I was like, Hey, This is a problem.

Malcolm: Like I, I, I don't understand how there is a future to the Korean economy and they're like, oh yeah, we all know this. Like everyone in the country, like in the financial class knows this. We just pretend like it's not true because the entire economy stops working. The moment we recognize this, and this is something people often don't understand, they're, I mean, what do you mean the entire economy starts working?

Malcolm: So here I need to explain how debt works because it's this miraculous thing when things are growing. If I'm making a $10 investment and $8 of that investment is debt, and $2 of that investment is equity and it grows by just 10%, my equity investment has actually grown by 50%. If it shrinks by just 10%, my equity investment has decreased by 50%.

Malcolm: We have leveraged [00:06:00] our land, our businesses, our houses, our families, our students, our cities, our states, our nation states, literally. It's not like we've taken out leverage on one thing in the economy. We have taken out leverage on literally every layer of the economy, which was beautiful in terms of the prosperity it provided while everything was growing.

Malcolm: But the problem is, is everything was only growing in the developed world because the number of workers and consumers was growing exponentially., but the productivity per worker was growing linearly.

Malcolm: When I came back to the US it was like traveling back in time 20, 30 years because we, in the US at our current rate of fertility collapse are about where Korea was in the mid nineties when I'm talking about the rate of fertility collapse in chorea, I can use fixed numbers, the current fertility rate to talk about how scary things get.

Malcolm: But if I'm gonna talk about it in the US because we're still early [00:07:00] in the collapse process, I need to project forwards what the fertility rate's going to be. So if the US fertility rate continues to decline at the same rate it has over the past 10 years going forwards, and we have one generation every 30 years, that means for every hundred Americans alive today, there will be 4.3 great-grandchildren.

Malcolm: So we are looking at it absolutely catastrophic collapse in the US if we can't get things under control.

Malcolm: So I think we need to ask ourself, , who has this under control? Which groups are persistently resistant to this? And it's the groups that deviate most from the mainstream society, but also the groups with the most hope for the future. So if you look around the world, yes, generally the wealthier a country is the lower its fertility rate is going to be, but you will see some noticeable differentiations from that.

Malcolm: For example, you have the US and Israel, which have unusually high fertility rates, and then you have countries like the block countries in China, which have unusually low, [00:08:00] demographic rates for their economic situation. , what appears to be the case here is the less hope. A country has, and the more people feel like they are only having kids to service an economic elite, the fewer kids they're going to have, where you can really see this play out is the one real, , counter to this rule of no country ever gets its demographics back up again happened in Georgia, which.

Malcolm: Began to happen in 2013 after they kicked out the last of the, communist, former rulers and, , moved to total self-management. And then you had this rapid reversal infertility rates because people began to feel like they had hope again, and that they weren't just having kids to be like a grist for some machine that didn't care about them.

Malcolm: But I wanna hear how you began to engage with some of these ideas. Simone,

Simone: what really blew my mind was when you thought to ask Spencer Greenberg to borrow some survey data that he had to find what traits correlated with families that were having a lot of [00:09:00] kids. Because the big question we had was, all right, well, I.

Simone: If a lot of cultures are just going to be extinguishing themselves, like in South Korea, like which cultures on the flip side of that are going to be inheriting the

Malcolm: future? . Yes, because we don't believe that. Just a collapsing world economy is a reason to bring kids into the world.

Malcolm: We also

Simone: will, we also believe it's expected that there will be a collapse in world economy. Right. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. So the bigger question is, okay, so that's gonna happen. I, I mean, ideally nations will plan for a little bit better. We're trying to make that a, a possibility

Malcolm: by advocating that's a, a big purpose of our foundation.

Malcolm: Yes. A lot of people see us as like, we're more like a. A climate change organization that's like climate change is gonna happen no matter what we do, we should start, let's prep planning around it at this point.

Simone: Yeah. But then on, on the flip side, it's also really important to just look beyond that, to look to the distant future of, of what will the future of humanity look like in the face of this If, if there is isn't intervention.

Simone: If there isn't an intervention, if there isn't an intervention, what we can expect is a [00:10:00] cultural mass extinction. And then the question is, okay, well if there's a cultural mass extinction, will it lead to like, A smaller but maybe super diverse ecosystem that then grows from there, which is kind of what we'd be cool with.

Simone: Or is it gonna end up with a monoculture anyway, we

well

Malcolm: explain what you mean. So, I mean, first I'm gonna say our naive assumption going into this is that most cultural groups that weren't religious would die off, and most cultural groups that were religious would, would stay. Yeah. And individual religiosity would be reinforced because , the amount, not a person's religion, but their amount of religiosity is highly heritable when you look at twin studies.

Malcolm: So these are so there's different ways of doing this. You can do this using polygenic risk scores, but you can also do it using twins who are separated at birth, identical twins. Mm-hmm. And then contrast them with fraternal twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families. So, they're the same ethnicity, they're, they're in other ways, very similar to each other.

Malcolm: What's. The only thing that would really cause this difference is if it was in some way associated with genes. This is how you can get an idea of how much of a person's [00:11:00] sociological profile within a specific metric is genetic. Anyway, so I was like, okay, so what this is probably gonna do is select for religiosity and both culturally and likely genetically, And that's not what we found.

Malcolm: And so up until that point, we hadn't really been freaked out because like, I like religiosity, people might, I'm, I'm fairly pro reli religiosity. I, I think our family, while we are like technically secular, we are like religious extremists and we live kind of like religious extremists and we practice our life kind of like religious extremists and almost all of our friends are religious extremists.

Malcolm: So, yeah. And we

Simone: should be clear, religiosity doesn't mean necessarily that someone believes in God or adheres to a specific religion. Religiosity is fervency of faith in something. So some of the most religious people are actually atheists. You'll, you'll know Cause they'll, they'll tell

Malcolm: you, well, this is, this is why I should have known this wasn't true.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. If you hung out with skeptic communities or in online spheres, what you'll know is that many of the, the, the people in these communities used to be some of the biggest fire brands before de converting. And when I think about [00:12:00] my daily life, when I think about like the sociological profile of religiosity, I haven't been preached to by a Christian in like 10 years.

Malcolm: Yeah. I get accosted on the streets by progressive extremists with their preaching, every other week. So the, it it's clear that this mind virus in our society is uniquely good at peeling out people from these cultures, was a high level of sociological religiosity.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But I'd love you to go into the data and what we found, Simone.

Simone: So what we did find correlated highly with high birth rates is outgroup hatred or dislike. So this is people responding to questions, asking if they'd be cool, if like one of their kids dated someone of a different race or cultural group.

Simone: And also a very keen comfort with hierarchy and like high power distance. So really what you're looking at is xenophobic. Authoritarians. Right? I mean, that's kind of like the, so if

Malcolm: you look at it, it's something called right-wing authoritarian personality. You can look it up on Wikipedia. There's a topic of [00:13:00] this and it's actually highly heritable as well.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which, is done using polygenic data. It's, is like all these other things. So it is something that can be condensed within a population if it is really genetically successful, which is showing itself to be right now. And yeah. And it makes

Simone: sense. Like, I mean, in the end we were like, oh duh.

Simone: Like of course it's not religiosity because religiosity isn't going to maintain cultural fidelity. What will maintain cultural fidelity is not, not allowing your people to consider outside ideas. Like that is a kind of a big thing. More authoritarian cultures are gonna keep people in, have strict rules.

Simone: Yep. A, a degradation or erosion of rules and discipline is one of the things that causes a hard culture to become a soft culture. And soft cultures are those that are most likely to see their fertility rates degrade over time because there's basically less motivation to do anything difficult. And

Malcolm: So the right-wing authoritarian personality is not actually a rightwing thing.

Malcolm: It's seen equally in both extremists on the right and extremists on the left. This is what, if you're a left-wing person, [00:14:00] makes you Antifa, for example. Just an extreme hatred about groups, unwillingness to listen to anyone else., and a preference for internal hierarchical structures in the dehumanization of, of, of people who aren't like, everything that I, I think anyone really who is honest about what Antifa really stands for.

Malcolm: I mean, it's the fascist organization that just labels itself, anti-fascists. It's like the Patriot Act lame itself as patriotic when it is anything but patriotic. But anyway, so, so you have these Antifa goon type personality clusters, which is going to increase. So why is it called the right wing authoritarian population cluster?

Malcolm: It's called that because it was named by professors at universities who saw all these traits as negative and like were unable to see them in their own ideological faction. But since then, other professors have gone looked at this and found that it actually is present in leftist extremists as well. So essentially what you're getting is this personality cluster that creates dangerous ideological extremists is, is what's being culturally and genetically selected for in our [00:15:00] society right now, not religiosity.

Malcolm: And again, this makes sense, right?

What's really cool is you can see this phenomenon happening in real time. If you look at the period where fertility rates started collapsing in the U S and then you lay that over voting patterns. You can begin to see the two parties shift further and further apart. Due to this new pressure in both the cultures and sociological profiles that are being selected for which I think can give us some idea of how quickly.

Changes. Selective pressures like this can be represented in major real world events. And this is not an older phenomenon either. It's, it's continuing to happen as can be seen in , this other graph here.

Is it likely that Selective pressures like this is solely to explain this phenomenon? No, very unlikely. There's likely a number of other pressures that are causing this cultural drift we're seeing here. However, it is very interesting that the phenomenon would predict that we would see this in the [00:16:00] data. And it's also something we see in the data at exactly the time we would predict it.

Simone:

Simone: right.

Simone: So it makes a lot of sense that these cultures would be like this because cultures that are more porous, more capable of losing people are going to lose them and to degrade into other cultures or lose their culture or lose their populations. Those cultures that kind of have these, these high walls around them, these, these barriers are going to be,

Malcolm: well also personality wise.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So you are somebody who has this religiosity thing this seems to correlate most with like how much you study your culture mm-hmm. How much you study your religion. Mm-hmm. Which isn't actually that protective of staying within a culture. Yeah. Whereas not listening to outsiders and not engaging with outside ideas, that's going to be very protective of staying within a birth culture.

Simone: Yeah. Yeah. Like I, I can actually think, so a lot of the most religious people I know have actually switched across many religions over time. Like they've gone from joining the Raj Nation wearing orange and [00:17:00] having really wild names to going to conservative Christian. And so that shows that, that , the religiosity always has been high, but they did move from one culture to another.

Simone: Whereas , people who are much more close-minded or unwilling to look at outside ideas wouldn't do that kind of switching,

Malcolm: right? But, but so religiosity, high religiosity of people who stay within these, these harder cultures. So what are these hard cultures that you're talking about and why are they useful to fertility rates?

Malcolm: Humanity can be thought of as our sociological tendencies, , the aspects of our personality that are predilection one way due to our biology and our genes. This can be sort of as sort of like our firmware or our hardware. Then sitting on top of that are mimetic clusters.

Malcolm: Today when we talk about memes, we often talk about memes as infecting an individual and then using that individual to replicate themselves through converting other individuals. But historically mimetic clusters function very differently than that. So what we today call religions and cultures, which in the book the pragmatist guided crafting religion we call cultivars, can be thought of, of these sort of mimetic [00:18:00] clusters that sat on top of our firmware, but was also subject to the same pressures that determined individual fitness.

Malcolm: Because mass conversions during early human history were actually fairly rare and occurred only during very specific periods of time. And even when they did occur, often the culture would shift dramatically.

Malcolm: Anyway, to get to the main point here, the level to which a person's culture carried with their family over time was really, really high in a historic context. And what that means is that the evolutionary processes could apply to cultures and cultural practices. Which increased individual biological fitness could outcompete cultural practices, which did not increase individual biological fitness.

Malcolm: This is how you find things like Judaism and Islam figuring out hand washing, literally hundreds of years before the secular world figured out hand washing, because there were selective pressures on the groups that practice hand [00:19:00] washing rituals that you didn't see in the groups that didn't. And this also has a play in many psychological tendencies that individuals have.

Malcolm: Right. So by that, what I mean is wherever you look in the world, whether it's Ramadan or Feast of the Firstborn or Lint, you have these arbitrary self denial rituals, which we now know strengthen the inhibitory pathways in your prefrontal cortex. They make it easier to shut down in truth of thoughts.

Malcolm: And, and now the secular world is beginning to figure this out, whether it's juice cleanses or like arbitrary fasting rituals. So these older cultural groups actually did a lot to both increase a person's mental health. While also increasing their fertility. This is why out of pretty much all of these widely successful cultural groups in the world almost all of them have some level of underlying homophobia in them.

Malcolm: Yeah. Increases biological fitness, even though it, it decreases individual quality of life. So we're not saying that all of these are, are good things, but you, you will see these patterns begin to exist across cultural groups that [00:20:00] systemically find themselves out competing cultural groups. Mm-hmm. So the tendency to stay within one of these cultural groups that has all of these software, patches that co-evolved with our biology over time, leads individuals to often be psychologically healthier.

Malcolm: That's why you see religious individuals almost always being psychologically healthier in sort of big studies done on this. Unless they're like, born, same sex attracted, or something like that, and then you get negative outcomes. But same sex attracted individuals born into religious communities.

Malcolm: Have higher fertility rates even today, so it's still optimizing for like technically what was being selected for when some cultures were out competing other cultures. So this tendency to not listen to outsiders and to think less of outsiders is of course going to be protective of people in iterations of these traditional cultural groups.

Malcolm: So the iterations of Christianity that were more, open to outsiders, more open to outside ideas. These were the most porous to the virus and the first [00:21:00] to die.

Malcolm: They got infected and then the virus started using them to just replicate the virus itself. So let's talk about this concept of the virus. If we think of cultural groups as these sort of evolving entities, Well, there's one strategy for an evolving entity that, that something could optimize itself around.

Malcolm: It could say, I actually don't care about increasing an individual's biological fitness. What I'm gonna do is I am going to convert individuals to this new cultural practice. Then I am going to use them to just convert other individuals to this cultural practice. And in fact, having kids is a bad thing because it lowers the amount of time they have to go out and just constantly try to convert other people.

Malcolm: Yeah, we'll do another video on the virus and how it works and why it's best thought of as a virus and, and yeah, we'll do that some other time. But anyway, so it began to infect these cultural groups that we're more open, more pro-social, more open outside ideas, and they began to be memetically sterilized.

Malcolm: That is what caused the [00:22:00] tendency of this strictly hierarchical I don't like outsiders view to be the most evolutionarily successful view within current human context. When we found that out, that's when we began to panic. That's when we began to be like, oh it's not just religious people like we like religious people.

Malcolm: It's a very specific sliver of religious communities that the, the Isis ification of the world is what we say. It's the Isis, like communities not Muslim, Christians, Jews, we all have that are going to outcompete the other groups. And that's where I began to really get worried about the future and began to say, well, is it even possible to create an alliance of deviant cultures?

Malcolm: So this is cultures that are resistant to the virus. But that are also pluralistic and open to creating an intercultural alliance mm-hmm. To protect themselves both from the virus, but then eventually from these [00:23:00] other cultural groups that once the virus is self exterminated because it is a self exterminating thing, it's, it's, it's culturally cascading people can't exist into the future.

Simone: So, yeah. So the big question is, will the future be a coercion caliphate of some sort, or will a future be a pluralistic diverse ecosystem? And we are hoping for, and fighting for the latter, but we think that without intervention, the former will form.

Malcolm: Some of our progressive washers, they may be listening to this like, yeah, but what about a future that's like progressive and humanist and it's like you guys have lost, you are so dead in the cultural group.

Malcolm: You're like somebody who's experienced the lethal dose of radiation and, and doesn't know that all their DNA has been scrambled already. Your fertility rates are socra, catastrophically low, your entire social structure. This is why the econom economic thing matters. Because what it means, and this is what I really realized in Korea, is [00:24:00] this dominant cultural group that exists around the world today.

Malcolm: I. In New York. So like these cultures differentiate a bit, or London or Paris. It's the rural cultures that really differentiate. It's these weird or the weird religious cultures like in New York, like who's really different In New York, it's the Hispanic Jews, right? Like they're, they're from different cultural groups.

Malcolm: But this dominant cultural group, in Korea, I was able to see how it reacted to demographic collapse. Like does it have a state at which it realizes how bad the situation has gotten? And what I learned is it doesn't, it does not have the capacity to react to this. Mm. In fact, it just begins to double down on all of its positions more and more and more.

Malcolm: Like in Korea, what, what is it? Was women, the four nos movement. So you can see how Korea, so let's talk about how screwed Korea is already. So not only are they in this horrible demographic situation right now, But in addition to being in a horrible demographic situation, they're already at a point where 60% of their population is above the age of 40.

Malcolm: There's basically no way they could solve this. They would need like a massive cultural push. They have spent 20 billion [00:25:00] in like the past, how many years? And it's, it is done almost nothing. And meanwhile, their society, if you look at the people who are most infected with this, this sort of progressive mind virus that exists around the world, well now you've got the the four nose movement, right?

Malcolm: Which is women being like, no men, no sex, no engagement. Like that's gonna make the problem for that cultural group even worse. And so what that showed me is, is that. There is no like adaptive ability within this progressive group. They're just going to go extinct. So when we think about the future, what we think about is that the cultural groups that are conservative, that are fighting this mind virus, but want a genuinely pluralistic future, and then the cultural groups that are just like progressives and disguise and are just waiting for their turn to exercise their culture over other people and to try their own shot.

Malcolm: I mean, now that the progressives are done trying to erase everyone's individual culture, they get a shot in the sun doing it themselves. And, and they still make good allies for now, but they're, they're clearly not long-term values [00:26:00] aligned with us. However, we also wanna be clear that we don't see them. We don't think any cultural group other than our own it, because obviously as our own cultural group, so obviously we're gonna see this better, but it's like a weird cultural group that's just our family, so it's not like anyone else, but we don't see any cultural group as being intrinsically better than any other cultural

Simone: group.

Simone: Yeah, like once someone in an interview ask me like, well, do you think there are any groups that shouldn't be breeding? And I'm like, no. Like, I want everyone to be represented in the future. I want more than everyone to be represented. I want new groups to form, but this

Malcolm: is, but this is really important. We do not have, if a group doesn't believe in gender equality, we don't see that as a negative thing, and we don't see that group as needing to be stamped out.

Malcolm: Yeah, you do you, however, then people will be like, well, what are you talking about? Like this idea of like xenophobic, like hierarchical groups, so why are you worried about them? Right? Mm-hmm. We're worried about them, not because we see them as worse than other groups, but we do have a vested interest in our own cultural groups surviving for a long time.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these groups will [00:27:00] try to erase us. Yeah. Like, it is naive to think that I could live in like ISIS controlled territory and maintain broadly the lifestyle I'm maintained today. Mm-hmm. I, and my kids would be killed. I, I can even see this within, the fact that our family, uses things like I V F and genetic selection, like we do a lot of weird stuff.

Malcolm: That there are cultural groups in the US where if they had dominant power right now, they would try to erase us as a cultural group. Yeah. And that's why we are interested in this alliance because we understand that we need to create an alliance with the other cultural groups that, either don't exist parasitically, like they don't just exist to take people from healthy cultural groups that are able to motivate fertility in their populations.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. But that also that we will eventually need an alliance to protect all of these cultural groups from the next threat after the progressives have self extinguished themselves. Yeah. Which is the sort of next. Rise of the Nazis, basically. It's gonna be bad, and it's, it is where the future is inevitably going because it's such a [00:28:00] successful strategy in the world today.

Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. But anyway, now back to demographic, perhaps more broadly.

Malcolm: So the problem that we have as a world is we are going to see population begin to collapse within the developed world. Now, people often say, oh, well can't you use immigrants to fix this? Right? And it's like, well, you do know that, that as of 2019 by the un, that famously inflates these numbers, that even by the UN's own statistic as of 2019, all of Latin America, so Central America, south America and the Caribbean collectively fell overpopulation rate.

Malcolm: Were like a, a farmer who is taking water from his neighbors pond to irrigate his crops because he has unsustainable water management practices himself. And you point out that this neighbor's pond is also evaporating and the firm is like, oh, I don't care. It doesn't affect me at all. Affect future generations or something.

Malcolm: It's insane. And then they're like, well, yeah, but Africa still has high fertility rates

Simone: right now in the world, countries, [00:29:00] nations that are above repopulation rate typically have a per capita income.

Simone: So that is per person on average of below $5,000 a year. So this is an extremely low level of earning, and basically as soon as people in a nation start opting in to the economy, once they start getting jobs, they. Stop having kids. And, and so that means that basically soon as people in, in Africa who are in nations that are below this, this number start to get access to, well, a little more wealth, which presumably we really, really want because it also means better healthcare, better education, better gender equality.

Simone: They will stop being able to fuel the rest of the world in terms of supplying a labor force. So it's, it's, I mean, the, the incentive that is created by someone who says, Oh, well just rely on immigration is basically, oh, well, okay. Well we're also kind of incentivized to keep these impoverished nations really impoverished.

Simone: Cause

if

Malcolm: we don't, well yeah, and even if it's not what they mean to create, you're creating an [00:30:00] environment where the developed world's economy becomes completely reliant on preventing Africa from developing. Yeah, exactly. And, and we're using Africa like a human, like, like a, a farm, like a human farm. Like it's really sick when you think about it.

Malcolm: Not a

Simone: good lesson. Thought we learned that lesson. It's a bad

Malcolm: look what they're saying. Yeah. I mean, think about what you're saying in the us , the progressive solution to the social security problem is because they didn't put in the effort themselves to have kids.

Malcolm: They're gonna import predominantly black people from Africa to support a bunch of non-working, predominantly white people who didn't put in the effort to prepare for the future themselves. Mm. Like, that's not a good look. That's not the not racist plan. Mm-hmm. That's, that's a really bad plan.

Malcolm: What we want is a world where somehow we can find a way to make prosper prosperity and broad access to e education compatible with a stable fertility rate. The problem is [00:31:00] for the progressive mindset is this social virus that has so contaminated their thought, that has so homogenized their population.

Malcolm: It is not compatible with that thriving, which means some other cultural group needs to be invented and needs to work for that to happen. Mm-hmm. Or one of the conservative cultural groups that exists right now needs to rise to dominance for that to happen. And so what you're saying is, yes, we can win, we can have prosperity wide access to education hopefully even gender equality, but we can't have that and this urban monoculture still existing.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And. And obviously that's an existentially threatening idea to the people who are benefiting from this urban monoculture to this culture's precast, to the people who determine truth for this urban monoculture. And who is that? That's the, the academics. That's the journalists that, that it's true.

Malcolm: Right. And you could say, oh, but Ade academia is getting worse and [00:32:00] worse. After academia was infected, it got worse at determining truth. It's the replication crisis has gone up. The amount of money needed. Yeah. Yeah. To get individual things. It is not, academia for the past 20 years is not pre eighties academia, that was a completely different organizational structure.

Simone: Heck, we have friends who've decided to discount all medical research post 1950.

Simone: So I think there's also so this logarithmic increase in, in bureaucratic bankruptcy in the academic

Malcolm: world. Yeah. And, and I think that the scientific method in and of itself is the correct way to approach truth. However, I think that people are really naive if they think that's the way that academia determines truth.

Malcolm: Mm. Academia is this weird organic system of citations which are used to determine your position within a status hierarchy and then eddie's that form. Mm-hmm. So this is something we often talk about, which is academic eddies, which is to say if there's a concept. In academia that a lot of people are writing on, there is more incentive for more people to write on it [00:33:00] because, well, it's what your advisor is going to do.

Malcolm: So you basically always do your first few research papers on what your advisor does, right? Those are the conferences you attend. Those are the conferences that exist. And so there is a huge disincentive to study anything outside of the zeitgeist. There's entire departments in universities, like the women's studies department that are basically dedicated to getting you fired if you do something that goes outside of the ideological police.

Malcolm: So why would you do that? Like what's the incentive to you as an academic? It can be really hard to get a job if you publish something. Like we have academic friends who, who have published just the data and gotten fired for this because, That there's entire departments now dedicated to, to going over everything that's being published by the, the formerly productive parts of academia and then just getting people fired.

Malcolm: So this idea that, that I am pre-scientific method, I am anti this weird, broadly new system that we use in academia. And I think what we need is an academic reformation. , this [00:34:00] situation is what the Reformation was. There was a group that said True should best be determined by people who spent their entire life studying it and then have been certified by central bureaucracy.

Malcolm: And then another group that said that central bureaucracy is prone to corruption. And then there was the reformation. And then I think post the Reformation, the bureaucracy cleaned itself up. Right. Pretty significantly. Right. And I suspect that after the academic reformation, the academic system might be able to fix itself.

Malcolm: And then hopefully then we have two competing parallel knowledge about it all the

Simone: better. Yeah. Because competition breeds strength. It's good.

Malcolm: Yeah.

Malcolm: But I wanna know your broad thoughts on what this means for the future of our species.

Simone: What I think people discount. Cause a lot of people kind of don't care. They may not be long-term oriented, and that's not logically inconsistent. I mean, maybe you just don't really care that much about the future or you just are more oriented around problems right now.

Simone: But I think the important thing to remember is a lot of the problems that you may care about right now, be it feminism or animal rights or the environment or overall suffering, will also be problems in the [00:35:00] future. And if you do not ensure that your culture is somehow represented in the future, those problems won't be solved after you die.

Simone: And so there's a lot of environmentalists to say, I'm not gonna have kids, or I'm not gonna have more than one kid or two kids because that's gonna hurt the environment. But if they end up. Not, not just having few kids, but also raising kids to believe that the world is falling apart, to give them a sense of hopelessness that almost ensures that they won't have kids, or at least have very few kids.

Simone: You're almost in, you, you're basically doing what, what you Malcolm have been describing this whole time, which is you're creating , a sterilizing culture, a culture that will self extinguish. And those values just won't be represented. So, we often, for example, get accused of trying to broker in some kind of Handmaid's Tale future coerce women into having kids, which is totally not true.

Simone: We really care about reproductive rights and freedom. But what we, we wanna turn around and say is listen, the future that we'll get, if people like you, who hold views [00:36:00] around reproductive rights, who hold views around, women's rights, don't choose to have kids, don't choose to pass your culture on in a sustainable way.

Simone: That's what we're getting. Which is, it's really, it's very frustrating because the very people who care about these things are to a great extent, the very people who truly are going to be responsible for this future. It's on them. And, and of course like we feel it's on us because we also wanna, we wanna protect

Malcolm: basic, basically Simone is, well, I can keep taking kids from conservative groups.

Malcolm: I can keep poaching kids. My culture can survive entirely parasitically off of nearby healthy cultures. What is your response to that?

Simone: What that's going to do is ultimately breed cultures that are more resistant to outside incursions, to people taking away or picking off their, their young, essentially.

Simone: So, imagine that there's a, a herd of rhinos and poachers come out and, if they can sneak up to a rhino and grab it and take it away [00:37:00] and sell it or whatever. Eventually all of the. Friendly docile, rhinos are going to be removed from the gene pool and you're gonna end up with super aggressive, super paranoid rhinos that charge at everything that moves.

Simone: Well, I mean that, that's what we're creating. Yeah.

Malcolm: In Japan, like where you had these deer that will like just come up and eat out of people's hands. That's because in Japan they didn't kill the deer that went up and ate out of people's hands. Whereas in, in Europe they did. So our dear are afraid you can do this to, to a human population.

Malcolm: And you can actually see this in Amish populations. There's been some interesting studies where they show that the longer a, an Amish family has been within their culture. Mm-hmm. And you see this intergenerationally. Fewer and fewer of their kids leave the

Simone: culture. Ah, so there you go.

Simone: Be that's our, that's our tomorrow problem. We have a today

Malcolm: problem. That's the tomorrow problem. But no, we live in the last prosperous age for a while. Humanity goes through cycles. Like, people are like, why, why can you so confidently predict a downfall scenario.

Malcolm: It's like, you know that this happened before. Mm-hmm. Like you look at Athens, we entered this period where, L G B T began to become accepted. [00:38:00] More women would get more equality. You look at the, the height of the Roman Empire, hedonism would begin to become more common, and then you'd have this collapse.

Malcolm: Yeah, we, we keep seeing this in history. Like you see the end of the Renaissance, we are heading towards another collapse and we're seeing all the signs of it. And a lot of conservatives, I think they take this and they say, well, that means like acceptance of L G B T groups is what causes the collapse.

Malcolm: And I'm like, no, A collapse is definitionally a decline from a cultural height. Yeah. Okay. That doesn't mean that those things are causing the collapse, but it would be nice. I do think the rise in hedonism, I do think the rise in a lack of self-control does lead to, to collapse. Well, I mean

Simone: are isn't it just the suggestion that like when people are given an excuse to go soft and they're given the technology and the amenities by a, a city or a civilization to go soft, then they go soft.

Simone: And then when you no longer have humans essentially holding up that civilization, then that civilization crumbles. [00:39:00]

Malcolm: Yeah. No, I mean, I, I think, I think you're right. And so what we're trying to do is, is we know that like we are in one of the last prosperous eras, which means we need to accumulate resources for our kids, but also use things like the technology we have that can access large populations to begin to build this cultural alliance network.

Malcolm: Mm. That can ensure, because my kids, they're like, you know what? I suppose the future a free internet doesn't really exist anymore because either the virus has taken it over or some fascist group has taken it over. Well then they'd say, why? When you, when you still had the free internet, did you not use it to broadcast the signal?

Malcolm: Did you not use it to begin to collect people together? What we're trying to do is create parallel networks. Exactly. Yeah. Parallel communication channels that can begin to function after things do begin this, this process of decline.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. So that the next time we have a civilization, so that the next time we have one of these periods of Renaissance, it can be perpetual. Yeah. And the iteration that our culture creates and, and one of the things that we're very fortunate about, and this is always one of our [00:40:00] biggest quotes, is thank God.

Malcolm: The forces that are arrayed against us are not as competent as they are malevolent. Because, the, the progressives are self extinguishing. Like we basically need to do nothing other than protect our kids from them. The fascist groups are dangerous. Like they do want to see people like us extinguished eventually they do wanna take our kids often just as much as the progressives do.

Malcolm: But they're often technophobic as well. They're often very conservative in how they relate to technology, which makes them out competable by techno folic populations.

Simone: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think one of the futures is a future in which, Kind of like with Jews, they need us because of certain, like economies or businesses that like we do and that they, for some moral or cultural reason cannot do.

Simone: If that makes sense. Explain what you mean by that. Well, so like, like, many Jewish groups became powerful because they, for example, were capable morally, religiously of, of being [00:41:00] bankers in, in civilizations where the mainstream culture could morally not earn interest on lent money, for example. Mm-hmm.

Simone: And obviously cities benefit when they grow, at least from, from debt and leverage. So we hope to be, to find a way with these little niche cultures that will not be part of the. Dominating culture of that, that inherits the future that will have some kind of technology that is, that is maybe, maybe morally repugnant to the future dominating civilization, but still necessary to it.

Simone: So they, they need to keep us around for something and they hate us. They may pogrom us, but they will keep

Malcolm: us around. Well, I think what you're missing here and it's really important to clarify this, is every cultural branch, like if you're looking at a cultural evolutionary tree mm-hmm. Has one of these fascist factions within it.

Malcolm: We, we call it the isis because I, ISIS is like a, any evoked like it has a lot of emotions evoked with it. People can imagine what we mean

Simone: by that. It's an easy shorthand for a religious state [00:42:00] that scares people.

Malcolm: Right, right. But what I'm, what I'm saying is well specific type of religious state that scares people, which is the type of religious state that is out-competing others right now.

Malcolm: Right? Yeah, yeah. So the point that I'm making is it's unlikely that any one of these is gonna dominate the future. It's likely you're going to have a number of them fighting amongst each other. And that was also true historically, if one of them ever conquered the entire world, they. They don't have to worry about the inefficiencies of not allowing bankers, right?

Malcolm: Yeah. Because they control the world at that point. The reason why, for example, all of the European powers still needed the banking class was because they were competing against other cultural groups at the time. And so it mattered much more to them that their group won than the cultural purity of their group.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And this is why you have this thing where you have a pogrom, they'd kick out the Jews and then they'd bring back the Jews when they needed money or something like that. But, but so like we'd love our cultural specialty to be for example, genetic technology, repro tech, artificial wombs, stuff like that.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Because [00:43:00] it, as society becomes more and more infertile all cultural groups will need that more and

Simone: more. And, and it'll secretly slink over to us when they have their henrie VII moment.

Malcolm: But yeah, I mean, what other thoughts would you have on this right here that you'd want to make sure people understand about our organization?

Simone: Basically that, that one day you stumbled into a brothel and that led you to understand that the future of the human race, that the future of anything you value depends on your ability to love

Malcolm: well. So what she means by that, and this is also something we can talk about, was in our broader framework, which I think is really important to understand how we see the world.

Malcolm: When I was in Korea, something that kept shocking me is I'm like, this population will be, 6% of what it is today in a hundred years. Like, how are they gonna deal with all of the empty buildings? How are they gonna deal with all that? Are they gonna import people? Are they gonna, it's like, well, they can't import people from Japan cuz they're also collapsing.

Malcolm: They can import [00:44:00] people from China because they're also collapsing. Hmm. And less than a hundred years ago, Japan went in. Killed millions of people to try to push their culture, because historically that was the way you pushed your culture through war,

Simone: through conquest, et cetera,

Malcolm: through conquest.

Malcolm: And you could see Russia, attempting something like this. Now, this isn't the only reason that they're, they're in this war right now. Of course. Yeah. The last time that they controlled Ukraine, they did make everyone speak Russian. That is what they taught in the school system. They did teach that you are actually Russians, like Ukraine is a fictional concept.

Malcolm: This is something Putin has said, which is basically saying, I want to push our Russian culture on this actually very closely aligned cultural group. Yeah. Which is an insane way to try to spread your culture when both Russia and Ukraine have desperately low fertility rates. The groups that are going to win in the future are not the groups that are best at.

Malcolm: War, which historically was, was the successful strategy. Actually, many of the most successful groups right now are staunchly, pacifist. Look at the Amish, look at the variety in [00:45:00] Israel at least. Um mm-hmm. Most pacifist groups, most very high fertility rates. Yeah. But to an extent, those groups only survive because they have , pro war groups around them to protect them.

Malcolm: To pro.

Simone: Yep. Exactly.

Malcolm: Yeah. And so, so that's not gonna be a long-term successful strategy, but the point being that, in this future that we're going into, you really need to completely change the way you think about geopolitics.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. The way you think about immigration. Even if you're thinking about your own independent cultural group, you are typically better off. For anything that increases the economy of whatever countries you are most present in and anything that decreases the amount of government control those countries try to exercise over your country.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Things like cultural projection through war and stuff like that, they're really largely irrelevant now. In, in terms of, of, of a intergenerational cultural victory. And the groups that are still thinking in those mindsets, they're going to go extinct. Mm-hmm. This reminds me because a lot of people, when you talk [00:46:00] about Accelerationist first non Accelerationist cultures, cultures that try to, to move forward, I mean, we saw this was a collapse as the Western Roman Empire, right?

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which was as Rome collapsed, some people said, we want to go back to the old ways of doing things. And some people said well, we shouldn't be hedonistic. Like, obviously this sort of broad hedonistic culture that's dominating our urban centers is stupid, but we do need to culturally innovate.

Malcolm: That was the Christians, this was this new religion, this new cultural group that was innovating in all these sorts of cool ways that was defining themselves, that was defining, what they were. That was having councils that were thinking about cultural innovation. And then the mystery cults really exploded during this period.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And these were individuals who were going back to the more pagan ways of doing things. And actually both the Christian groups and these mystery cults were growing in the, this same communities. They were growing among military organizations. Hmm.

Malcolm: And so they were both actually working with the same populations, but the the groups that said, we need to [00:47:00] go back to the old ways of doing things. They died because the technological and cultural context that they were in had shifted. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's what we're gonna see in the future is I think that the groups that are most interested in innovating themselves to deal with this new cultural context that we're dealing with, are going to be the groups that are ultimately victorious.

Malcolm: And what we hope is that there's as much pluralism within those communities as possible, and some sort of pluralistic alliance can form within those

Simone: communities. Yeah. And I think it's possible. I think today we have technology resources the ability to spark something that didn't exist in the past.

Simone: So odds are looking good. There's lots of hope.

Malcolm: Yeah. And I can say that the one thing that our organization, we were like, oh, the prenatals, you must move about getting fertility rates up. We're like, that is so done. It's not gonna happen. No one's getting broad fertility rates up, and the problem isn't solved.

Malcolm: By doing that, I, I solved nothing by convincing somebody from a, an iteration of like, progressive culture that doesn't wanna have kids to have kids like I I have solved nothing. Where [00:48:00] I have solved something is if there's some weird iteration of progressive culture that for whatever reason is resistant to most of the viral forces and does believe in having kids and does believe in, self denial rituals and does believe in sort of many things that would lead themselves to be natural cultural allies with us.

Malcolm: Yeah, they would make a useful ally, but, but the people who are just completely brainwashed, they're completely useless to me. And I think that that's a message that people aren't used to hearing is, is to say, you just don't matter to us. They're like, well, don't you? How do you convince this progressive woman to have a lot of, I don't care.

Malcolm: If, if, if she's already from this, this cultural group that sees their entire, like, reason Detra as surviving through parasitizing nearby healthy cultural groups, I, again, we're not like judging them. Like we're not judging them in, in the context of that's a worse way of doing things, but it's an unsustainable way of doing things that makes all of the cultural groups around them worse.

Malcolm: Intergenerationally. Yeah. So,

Simone: Yeah, you're, you're actually quite right in that they really do kind of poison the other groups [00:49:00] around them in a way that's really messed up.

Malcolm: When I say worse I don't mean like worse in an objective sense, I mean more dangerous to my group and more dangerous to a pluralistic mindset because they teach all of the cultural groups around them that pluralism is threatening essentially.

Malcolm: Yeah. That being accepting of outsiders is threatening and that's why they are like the ultimate dangerous force from our world perspective. Yeah. But it's also why we don't have really any animosity towards any cultural group, even if they're very different from us. Even if they're like, well, we don't like L G B T populations, we don't like, women.

Malcolm: Those are things we believe in, but even groups that don't feel that way. We're like, do what works for you so long as your culture is thriving and you are not using force to force people into your culture, because that's where it gets really dangerous. And that's something we're really against.

Malcolm: Or using force to keep people in your culture. That's another thing that we're, we're, we're quite against. So if we could live in a society where everybody's just completing on an equal playing field, the government isn't trying to use its [00:50:00] powers to take money from one cultural group and then use that money to convert people to this sort of dominant monoculture.

Malcolm: But also nobody is with guns forcing people to convert or threatening people to convert, or threatening people to stay in their culture. I think that's the ideal cultural ecosystem that we're trying to create because we believe that our culture can survive within that ecosystem. Yeah. And thrive within that ecosystem.

Malcolm: And we would encourage every culture that thinks that they can thrive within an equal playing field that they should want to join this movement.

Simone: I'd be delighted if they did. So we'll see. We'll see how well we're, we're able to evangelize all this, get other people on board,

Malcolm: get some good competition going.

Malcolm: Mean concept. But it's, it's a, it's an interesting philosophy, we'll see. And I, and I do think, one person was like, oh, you don't believe in state services. I think that we should rely on our cultural groups to provide much of our services. Right.

Malcolm: .

Malcolm: So the reason why progressive groups so ardently advocate for state services is because if you want to convince somebody to leave one of these harder older cultures, most of these cultures offer a lot of what our state services, they offer[00:51:00] social safety nets, when you end on hard times, they offer services that help care for elderly individuals.

Malcolm: They offer all sorts of services. And so if you want somebody to leave one of those cultural groups, but your group is parasitic and it's not willing to supply any of these services itself. Well, I mean obviously you need the state to supply those services. So what you do is you take money from all cultural groups so that you can more easily deconvert people from the cultural groups that are supplying these services to people.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. Which is just really predatory and twisted. And so I think that, I guess my view of state services would be, it should be an opt-in thing. You should be able to opt into the state service system or you should be able to, like the Amish do with social security. Amish don't pay Social Security because the state understands that their culture is actually very effective at supplying social security to Amish individuals.

Malcolm: Exactly. And I'd love to be able to opt into that. And then people are like, yeah, but then all of these systems wouldn't work. And it's like, Have you noticed something there? Is it that the [00:52:00] cultural groups, this sort of degraded cultural group that you've created that doesn't actually care for its own members, is that a problem?

Malcolm: Nobody would want to join it if, if they had to, everyone would start going back to these older cultural groups that do provide all these services. If you took them away from the state, it's like, ah, maybe light bulb there. You've realized what it means to be parasitic. But anyway,

Malcolm: We are so excited that you guys joined us

Malcolm: hopefully we got crazy here. But it's something we really did need to talk about at some point.

Simone: Yeah. Here's, hoping it turns out well save a copy of this video. Wait 200 years and half your either totally non-existent because you failed or existent great grandchildren check it out and tell us if we were right or not.

Simone: Well,

Malcolm: I mean, we successful, I mean, I think it's an existential quest to create a pluralistic alliance of conservative cultures that can fight both , this sterilizing mind virus, but also fight the [00:53:00] cultures that are just, progressives waiting in the wings to erase every culture they come across the moment they gain power.

Malcolm: Mm-hmm. And I, I do think that now we're in this position, very emperor of Dune, where all of the conservative cultures finally have a reason to band together. It it, so the plot of Emperor of Dune is the this guy basically says, how do I get these groups that have always been at each other's throats?

Malcolm: Well, I need to create an authoritarian force so evil that they'll finally have a reason to build structures to work together. And they'll remember how bad it is to have one culture sort of ruling all other cultures dictatorial. I hope that this progressive mind virus has created that so that iterations of all of the conservative traditions can understand why they're better off in pluralistic ecosystems and why they're better off building cultural infrastructure that helps defend those pluralistic ecosystems.

Malcolm: Because right now if we don't ban together, we all lose

Simone: big stakes. Good luck. I love you, Malcolm. Hopefully love you. We'll have a lot of [00:54:00] successful grandkids and they with a bunch of other families save the world. Yay.

Malcolm: Hey, we need people for our kids to marry. Right? That's why we gotta bring this group together.

Malcolm: Yeah, that's the

Simone: real long call here. So guys, hurry up cuz our kids need to not be single forever. All right, thanks. Okay, thanks. Bye. Yeah. Cool. Love you Malcolm. Speaking of which daycare pickup time? You're doing leftovers, right? I'm stir Frys or do you want me to Yeah, you make

Malcolm: great. She did tacos yesterday.

Malcolm: They were fantastic. And she did it for a guest. She was telling me today that she was diluting the meat with onions to, to make it last a bit longer and how to stretch it. Yeah, I gotta stretch it now. I'm making taco leftovers. Getting a little glimpse into our life here, yu Okay. Mix it with some curry spices.

Malcolm: Create something really special with it. Then eat it with chips, so it'll be quite good.

Simone: Cool. I'll get it ready for you while you pick up the kids. Will do. Have a good one. You too. Welcome.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe